Men Of War: Brothers Heading To D.C. To Be Honored At WW II Memorial

Two brothers will be among those a Norwich group will take to the U.S. WW II Memorial

May 16, 2012|By KATHERINE OGDEN, Special to The Courant, The Hartford Courant

When you are 93, tomorrow is hoped for but never promised.

So, when John Cyrulik got the news in January that he and dozens of other veterans would get a chance to visit the World War II Memorial inWashington, D.C., in May his reaction was mixed.

He was pleased to be part of the event, but still a little worried that the trip was a long four months away.

Though he is far from frail, Cyrulik has had a simple goal while waiting for the trip: "To try my best to live so I can go."

Like all veterans, Cyrulik, a former member of the Middletown Fire Department where his brother Frank and son John Jr. served as chief, has many personal reasons to visit the memorial that was dedicated in May 2004 in the nation's capital. For this Middletown widower, however, a major reason is that his brother Edward Cyrulik of Portland, 88, a fellow World War II veteran of the Pacific campaign, is going, too.

They will be among the 100 veterans and 45 volunteer guardians and medical personnel traveling to Washington by chartered jet on May 26 as part of the eighth AmericanWarrior Day of Honor program.

AmericanWarrior, a nonprofit organization based in Norwich, has sponsored the trips to Washington around Memorial Day and Veterans Day and made them free to World War II veterans. The trip gives the veterans a chance they might otherwise not have had to see the national memorial honoring the sacrifices they and others made during the war.

"It's very, very emotional," said Susan Ponder, coordinator for AmericanWarrior.

Pulled from their family by a war 8,000 miles away, the Cyruliks found a way to stay connected. Now, 70 years later, they're taking a journey together again.

Edward and John Cyrulik are two of 10 children, six boys and four girls, who were raised in a four-room apartment on Butternut Street in Middletown. Their mom was a homemaker. Their father was a textile worker who died of cancer in 1940.

John Cyrulik was called to war first. He remembers having his Army physical on Dec. 5, 1941. Two days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was drafted on Jan. 15 and assigned to an artillery unit with theU.S. Army's 37th Infantry Division in Ohio and sent to the South Pacific. A year later, his brother Edward followed.

After watching his schoolmates get pulled into the military, Edward Cyrulik planned to volunteer early but was drafted first. At 19, he was assigned to the Army's 4th Engineer Special Brigade, an amphibious force that was activated at Fort Devens, Mass., in 1943 and deployed to the South Pacific.

Another brother, Adolph Cyrulik, also went to war in the Pacific and survived. He has since died.

John and Edward Cyrulik were among the millions of soldiers in the U.S. Army during the war. Despite the long odds, they found themselves stationed on the same island in the Solomons.

In a letter Edward wrote to John on John's 90th birthday, he describes his effort to find his older brother after learning that both of their units were stationed on Bougainville Island, which before the Japanese invasion had been controlled by Australia. The island is now an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea.

"I knew your outfit was there, but you didn't know my outfit was there also," Edward wrote. "I decided to walk over to see if I could surprise you."

Sitting in Edward's living room during a recent interview, the two remembered the moment.

John Cyrulik, who had been asleep, was moved to tears when awakened by his brother. "There's no way I could believe that was him."

"It was unbelievable," Edward recalled. "We had a good time."

Later in the war, they crossed paths again near the city of Aparri on Luzon Island in the Philippines.

Again, Edward set out to find his brother, but unlike the relatively short walk he took the first time, finding his brother the second time wasn't easy. He had to hitch a ride on an Army truck headed into the mountains where John was stationed. The truck, however, took him only part of the way. He had to trudge the rest of the way alone through enemy-infested jungle armed only with a .45-caliber pistol.

"That's all I had, like a damn fool," Edward said. "I was just lucky it was a smooth walk."

The Cyrulik brothers don't often talk about the war. But as they reminisced during this interview, with them was another WW II veteran, Paris Kollias, 87, who also lives in Portland. Kollias served in Europe with the 135th Engineer Combat Battalion. Kollias, who survived the German winter offensive into Belgium that would be remembered as the Battle of the Bulge, is also joining the AmericanWarrior trip to the memorial.

The three men talked of famous U.S. Army generals, people raiding garbage cans looking for food and civilian casualties.

"One of the saddest things I saw was a school in England," Kollias said. "It was all kids, 12 and under, wounded by the war. When I saw that, I was glad that wasn't happening at home."

The AmericanWarrior trip will cost the group about $40,000, which, Ponder said, will use up all of the resources AmericanWarrior has at the moment. Forty-eight volunteer guardians, among them Grippo and John Cyrulik's son, Tony, who lives in Rocky Hill, will escort the group from the plane to a motor coach and to the memorial.

For the Cyrulik family, the story of one brother braving the jungle to see the other has often been told. Other, more difficult, memories from the war have been much slower to reveal themselves.

"He never talked about it," said Lena Cyrulik, who has been married to Edward for 66 years. "I don't think he liked the memory."